I wrote this the otehr day, after being frustrated that my guild in WoW wasn't raiding anymore after I renewed my account to do just that. It's a long read, so if I won't hate you more than I already do if you don't, but please leave a comment with your opinion If you read this behemoth. Thanks in advance




Let me start off by saying that my name is Wesley, and I’m a World of Warcraft addict. Playing that game has been a large part of my life for the last 2+ Years of my life. I’d also like to say that I’ve pretty much stop playing, because I hate what the game has become. It’s now all about pvp(Player vs. Player) battlegrounds and Arena farming. While I don’t mind it when this is a sort of… side quest if you will, I LOVED Raiding in that game. It was arguably the most enjoyable/rewarding part.

I probably won’t be renewing my account again, ever. Judging from what I’ve read from the features that Blizzard plans on implementing in the next expansion, they’re just trying to focus on the casual player, what with hero classes being an unlockable slot on your account, not an extension of your character, which is what everyone had anticipated it to be from the beginning. I remember speculating about it with my old guildmates before the Burning Crusade came out, and how awesome it would have been to have arch priests and Blade Masters and Elementalists. But no, the only hero class announced is the Death Knight, and it’s going to work like the Jedi did in Star Wars Galaxies before they tried to make that game more appealing to the casual player also.

For those that don’t know, the original Jedi system worked something like this. You would start the game, and select your starting class. Fine, then as you leveled up that class, and then there were further professions that you could level up. Oh, and you could only level up each level with experience from the profession; IE: You could only level your dancing by dancing, and your music by practicing music, etc… Alright, that’s all fine and dandy, but how the fuck do I get my lightsaber? Well, no one really knew… The profession mastery sequence was randomly generated upon character creation and unknown to the player until it was unlocked, upon which time you would see a force-sensitive slot in your server log in window. The developers finally added a holocron system, which informed the players which Professions they needed to gain the force-sensitive slot. The first jedi was originally unlocked on November 7th, 2003, about 4 months after the game was released, also the same day the game was released in Europe.

4 Months sounds like a good trade off for being a Jedi. To be honest, if I had had a good enough computer at the time and could have played SWG, I would have not expected to get my Jedi slot, and that’s ok with me. I couldn’t put the time into it, so therefore, I didn’t deserve it.

However, to most people, this was ‘unfair’, and most people didn’t believe that the force slot didn’t exist, and the early Jedi would often have incredibly high Bounties on their heads, just for being jedi. So, what did SOE do? They did an overhaul of the entire game, and made it so that instead of 34 Professions, there were 9 ‘iconic’ classes, and Jedi was one of them.

You’d think that people would expect the path to becoming a Jedi would be an arduous one, so why would they complain about it? I never got to play the pre-New Game Enhancements, but I would have liked to, after playing the horrible mess that is the new game (I played the trial, don’t bother. It’s worse than Superman 64).

I got a little off track there, but it was important for where I was going with the Death Knight. In all honesty, the Death Knight should be a Paladin exclusive hero class, and Blizzard should get off their lazy asses and make up at least one new Hero class for every class. Honestly, they did it(somewhat) in Warcraft 3, and there are already long lists of speculated hero classes on wowwiki, so why not just build off those? They could do one hero class per expansion, and it wouldn’t have to be neccesary for PVE Progression(which I have a bone to pick about that also…) making the hero classes only have a sort of…extended talent tree.

Now, my beef with pvp in wow. Back in the old days, before WoW 2.0, there was a thing called pvp ranks. You had to be a certain rank to get pvp gear, with only one person being able to buy the gear at the top per week. Sounds fun, right? constantly trying to get more honor points than the other guys so you could get the High Warlord weapons. Well, in wow 2.0 this all changed. They made it so you could buy weapons and armor with your honor points directly, making it so that you could pvp for an hour a week and get some new gloves at the end of the week. This is great for the casual players, the ones that don’t have the time to do anything(such as raiding). But for the high-end raiding players, this gave them an easy way out of getting the top of the line stuff. It used to be hard to get GOOD pvp gear. Now it’s the easy way to get everything, which makes people say “Oh, well, I get gear that looks exactly the same and is still pretty good from something that is a lot easier and doesn’t depend on 24 other people, so I’m not going to raid anymore.

In short, WoW endgame currently pisses me off to no end. Blizzard took it and completely turned guilds upside-down by lowering the raid cap from 40 to 25 people, and now with the pvp, the raiding pool is extremely thin. For example, on my old server(Gurubashi) there are MAYBE 3 guilds that can clear Serpent Shrine Cavern. Most of the old guilds from before B.C. have dissolved, and the one or two that are still trying to progress are always in danger of stopping raiding entirely because of lack of attendance.

Alright, enough ranting on World of Warcraft and Blizzard and Sony Online Entertainment. They’re sell outs. What’re you gonna do. Now, after having decided that I’m done with wow, I installed the 15 day trial of EvE online. Eve, in case you didn’t know, is a sci-fi space exploration mmo set in another universe about 1,000 years in the future. The economy is entirely player driven, with mining of space ore(and the applications thereof) being the main source of income for players. There is no leveling system in the game, rather you train skills in real time consistently through a page on your character sheet (such as drone operation, mining, and science). These skills take anywhere from 20 minutes to a month to train. Sounds boring, but the main appeal that keeps me coming back to make a trial account of this game every interesting new expansion (They re-modeled every ship in the game this time around) is the Ship control. It’s probably my favorite ship control for larger cargo ships in space. It dosen’t really make sense for me to have a twitch-adrenaline flying system for Huge ass Cargo ships that carry several thousand Metric Tons of materials. So I like flying and planning out jump routes in Eve. Unfortunately, there isn’t much else to do. You’re in a capsule that you’re eternally hooked into in the game, because it feeds you and puts the skills into your brain so you don’t actually have to do any real work(why don’t they have this IRL?). But this makes the rest of the game quite boring. I don’t know, maybe if I had been in a corp like Guiding hand social club” I could probably enjoy the game a lot more. But alas, I can’t go into a local Cantina and get into a brawl with some jackass over the most recent developments in the new ore bill in the sector’s congress. I want to be able to do shit like that, except blow people’s heads up.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I want to try the old star wars galaxies , with Eve ship controls, and the end game raiding of World of Warcraft, as well as the attention to class development that the old Star Wars Galaxies had. ^_^